Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac Review

With Office 2011, Microsoft’s flagship suite gets back to work with better compatibility, more flexible interfaces, welcome feature additions, and an all-new Outlook email client.

Microsoft Office has always had a lot of features--too many features, some would say. With menus inside of menus, palettes aplenty, and toolbars crammed with tiny buttons, the biggest problem with Office was finding the features you needed without being bogged down by the ones you never touched. Plus, with the Mac version of Office lagging at least a year behind the Windows suite, feature parity could be an issue, so Mac users often felt like second-class citizens over, for example, the lack of VBA macros.

With Office 2011 for Mac, the Redmond giant has taken care to include as many of the new features in Office 2010 for Windows as possible. But the suite looks and feels more Mac-like thanks to parts of it being rewritten in Cocoa. More important is its OS X integration--the suite-wide Media Browser and support in Outlook for Quick Look, Spotlight searching, and Time Machine backups. Wait, Outlook? Yes, Office’s Mac-only email client Entourage has been replaced by a true Mac version of Outlook, which was formerly only available for Windows. In the following pages, we’ll highlight the new features common to the whole suite--as well as in the main apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook--to help you decide whether it’s worth it to upgrade from Office 2008. (Office 2011 also includes Microsoft Messenger, but we’re skipping it here because it’s a free download and not important enough to sway anyone’s upgrade decision.)

With Office 2011, Microsoft is also launching smartly designed Web App versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word to let coworkers collaborate on documents in real time, via the free-for-consumers SkyDrive cloud-storage system. We only touch on it in our reviews since it wasn’t fully operational at press time, but we’ll provide a deeper look, including tips and tutorials, in our next issue.

Put some coffee on. It’s time to get things done with Office 2011!

Suite-Wide Features

If you like compatibility and ease of use, you’ll dig the new features in almost every app in Office 2011.

Bountiful Blueprints

The Template Gallery lets you start customizing documents before you even open them.

The Template Gallery available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2011 borrows…ahem…the look and feel of iWork’s Template Chooser, though at least it also adds new features. Sure, you can skim through template pages and enlarge them for a closer look, but you can also search for templates by keyword. Good thing, since thousands are available online in addition to the examples on your Mac. And your choices don’t end there--most local templates let you pick color and font schemes for your document before it’s created, and these changes update in the gallery so there are no surprises when you get down to work.

The Ribbon Method

The ribbon may take up extra space, but it puts the tools you need in one place.

Remember the animated Mac Plus that offered “helpful” tips based on what it thought you were doing in old versions of Office? Its spirit lives on in the ribbon, a dynamic toolbar that changes depending on what you’re actually doing in an Office 2011 document. Select a picture in your Word file, and image-related tools slide into view. Return to your copy, and the text formatting features you need become available. Best of all, you can switch toolsets manually by selecting tabs. Our only beef is that the ribbon’s handy features take up valuable real estate in document windows. But if you want to kick it old-school, you can easily collapse the ribbon or just turn it off entirely in the preferences.

Maximized Media

Finally, an iWork-style Media Browser arrives in Office 2011.

Adding multimedia to documents is now much simpler thanks to a new Media Browser shared throughout Office 2011. Not only does it give you access to iLife and iTunes files, it finally brings Microsoft’s clip art, shapes, and even text symbols out of the Objects palette into one searchable, easy-to-use window. And new image-editing tools let you crop photos, adjust colors, and even easily remove a picture’s background in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

VBA: Your Workflow MVP

After notoriously disappearing in Office 2008, VBA--Visual Basic for Applications, the scripting language that powers time-saving Office macros--is finally back on the Mac…mostly. You can use the Macro Recorder to record complex or frequently performed functions, then write your own macros from scratch or edit a recorded macro’s code and share it with coworkers. We just wish the new kid on the block, Outlook 2011, was VBA-aware like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Improved Compatibility

There’s no escaping death, taxes, and Office files that don’t open correctly on Macs, right? Well, as long as you’re swapping files with users of Office 2010 for Windows, you should be good to go. Even most Publishing Layout Word documents can be edited in Word 2010 and safely saved back to your Mac. Older versions of Office on either platform won’t support new features like video or image filters and effects, but you knew there had to be a catch somewhere.

Comments

The one feature that compelled me to upgrade from 2008 centered around the inclusion of Outlook. I read time and time again that Outlook 2011 would be able to read Outlook pst files from Windows. With that in mind, I upgraded from 2008. While it may be true that the Mac version can read pst files from Windows, it is a huge misnomer. It simply does a ONE TIME CONVERSION of your pst file. You can read your Windows files, but once you convert it, the file is no longer compatible with Outlook for Windows.

I was hoping I could use Outlook at work and bring my pst files home, open them on my Mac, do a bit of work (and instead of carrying my work PC laptop around), and then still use the file back at work the next day. That was my impression of being able to READ pst files. Instead, Outlook 2011 allows you to CONVERT your pst files to the new Mac format.

I could accomplish nearly the same thing using Thunderbird from Mozilla, and have been able to do that for years. Without the true integration of Outlook, I might have just stuck with Entourage or Thunderbird and never upgraded from Office 2008.

Does not support configurations with external eSATA RAID drives.
Does not support configurations with the new Lacie Thunderbolt external drives.
(In both of the above cases the Product Key validation algorithm fails to work and your must re-enter the Product Key nearly every time you open an Office 2011 application - yes that could be multiple times each day!) Apparently the inept Microsoft software engineers decided to tie their Product Key validation to the hardware configuration including externally connected hardware. (Have they ever worked with a notebook PC?) This means that it will break every time some new technology comes out. Major fail!

I too was upset that there was no "resend" button in Outlook 2011. HOWEVER, you can resend with a quirk in the system. Go the the sent box and simply hit 'reply to all'. This brings up the old message, with the same person (or people) in the To: box. Hitting 'reply' doesn't work, but 'reply to all' does. Not sure what Microsoft was thinking when set this (without telling anyone), but maybe it was a mistake. At least for now, we have functional 'resend', though.

The transition to Outlook went smooth and was problem free. However, I hate the changes in the interface, the ribbon can not be customized, it will not read the next unread email only the previously read email and it crashes constantly. A real waste of money in my opinion.

I believe that this rating is inflated. Yes there are improvements, but many features of the old Microsoft Office Suite are missing. And Outlook is missing things like, "resend," easy synchronization, etc. Additionally it slows down or crashes frequently.

The Excel add-in tools, Solver and Analysis Toolpak, no longer come with Office. When you inquire after them in Help, you are directed to third-party publishers (Frontline for Solver, AnalystSoft for StatPlus:mac). You are told that there are free downloads, and indeed there are. But the free versions are what you might call strange attractors for the full, paid versions. The free Solver isn't crippled by its incompleteness, but StatPlus:mac LE (For Limited Edition. There's a bit of truth in advertising.) comes with 17 routines out of about 45.

Furthermore, AnalystSoft has let my support tickets and e-mails go unanswered for over a week. They seem not to have a phone.

With no calendar synching, how am I supposed to get Outlook's calendar onto my iPhone?

Why must the toolbars take away vertical space, leaving a two-inch gray gap on either side of my document? Put the toolbars on the side, where everyone has more monitor space.

Why doesn't anyone at Microsoft say "Wait a minute, a floppy disk is really a lousy symbol for 'Save' since no Mac that can run Office 2011 has a floppy disk drive"? (Was bark and a charred stick already taken?)

I can't believe that Office 2011 is the best that Microsoft can do, after all this time. Plainly, Microsoft still doesn't get it. I'm surprised that MacLife wasn't a little harder on them in this review. To me, the review read more like an advertisement.

Huge omission on Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011: No resend button for mail. I use that all the time. And that damned Windows Office 2007 ribbon. Yuck. And there's no indication of the send/receive mail process for POP accounts like with Entourage. I'm sticking with 2008... Save your money and don't buy this.

Sure, get the Home or Student version for Word, Excel and Powerpoint for $100 if you really need it (Word is faster and more stable than its predecessor in my experience), and you can have both versions on your Mac. Keep the Pro version with Outlook on the store shelf. Entourage is maddening sometimes, but it works.

If you're currently working for an employer that uses Microsoft Exchange for email, etc., be aware that Outlook 2010 does not support Exchange 2003. (Entourage 2008 does support Exchange 2003.) If your employer hasn't upgraded to Exchange 2007 (and many haven't!), the new Outlook will do you no good.

@ rickpdx- I have the new outlook, I couldn't find a read rcpt option in an of the menus.
The rest of the app is so much better than my PCs Office 2007. The outlook is a very mac-cocoa feel app. The attachment preview function is a life saver since every email I rcve has an attachment, I no longer have to open adobe just to confirm info. When I tried to load my day job large email acct on Entourage 2008, it crashed every time due to a "corrupt database" (MS's warning) 2011 loaded perfectly and updated immediately. I have to say I would rather use my mac at the office for my mail than my PC-2007 office suite.

I agree. As a graphic designer, I use InDesign for all of my layout work. However, I have several clients (who think they are designers ;-) who always give me their Publisher files. In order to open them I have to use another computer to edit and work with the files. It would be so much easier if Publisher were made available for the Mac so I could stay on one machine.

I'd like to know if the new Outlook supports what is found in its Windows counterpart, read receipt requested. It is so frustrating that this tool, which is essential for my work, is available on Windows but not in Mail.app.